and rather tottery form.--Of this
unlooked for advent more hereafter.--Other distinguished soldiers came
from Aldershot and down from town. A permanent Under Secretary, correct
but visibly bored, represented the India Office.

The parish, neglecting its accustomed industries and occupations,
mustered in strength; incited thereto, not only by the draw of recently
resurrected scandal, but by news of the appointment recently offered Sir
Charles Verity, which had somehow got noised abroad. The irony of his
illness and death occurring precisely when he was invited to mount
nothing less--according to local report--than an oriental throne,
sufficed to stir the most lethargic imagination. Moralists of the
Reginald Sawyer school might read in this the direct judgment of an
offended deity. Deadham, however, being reprehensibly clannish, viewed
the incident otherwise; and questioned--thanks to an ingeniously inverted
system of reasoning--whether the said Reginald Sawyer hadn't laid himself
open to a charge of manslaughter or of an even graver breach of the
Decalogue.

Theresa Bilson--in whose hat artificial buttercups and daisies hastily
made room for bows of crape--lurked in the humble obscurity of the free
seats near the west door. To right and left she was flanked by a guardian
Miss Minett; but these ladies to-day were but broken reeds on which to
lean. They still laboured under a sense of having been compromised, and
of resultant social ostracism. This, although their former parsonic
lodger had vanished from the scene on the day following his threatened
immersion--a half-hearted proposition on his part of "facing out the
undeserved obloquy, living down the coarse persecution" meeting with as
scant encouragement from his ecclesiastical superior, the vicar, as from
themselves. Theresa--it really was hard on her--shared their eclipse.
Hence the humble obscurity of the free seats, where she sniffed, dabbed
her eyes and gurgled, unheeded and unseen.

Finally young Tom Verity--home on his first long leave--having
accompanied the family party from Canton Magna and feeling his sense of
humour unequal to the continued strain of their sublime insularity,
benevolently herded two stately, though shivering, turbanned native
gentlemen, who reached Deadham during the early stages of the ceremony no
one quite knew whence or when. In the intervals of his self-imposed
duties, he found time to admire the rich unction of his father, the
Archde